Udmurt language

Udmurt varieties can be grouped into three broad dialect groups:

• Northern Udmurt, spoken along the Cheptsa River
• Southern Udmurt
• Besermyan, spoken by the strongly Turkified Besermyans

A continuum of intermediate dialects between Northern and Southern Udmurt is found, and literary Udmurt includes features from both areas. Besermyan is more sharply distinguished.^{[citation needed]}

The differences between the dialects are not major and mainly involve differences in vocabulary, largely attributable to the stronger influence of Tatar in the southern end of the Udmurt-speaking area. A few differences in morphology and phonology still exist as well; for example:

• Southern Udmurt has an accusative ending -ыз /-ɨz/, contrasting with northern -ты /-tɨ/.
• Southwestern Udmurt distinguishes an eighth vowel phoneme /ʉ/.
• Besermyan has /e/ in place of standard Udmurt /ə/ (thus distinguishing only six vowel phonemes), and /ɵ/ in place of standard Udmurt /ɨ/.

Udmurt is written using a modified version of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet:

Unlike other Uralic languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, Udmurt does not distinguish between long and short vowels and does not have vowel harmony.

The consonants /f x t͡s/ are restricted to loanwords, and are traditionally replaced by /p k t͡ɕ/ respectively. As in Hungarian, Udmurt exhibits regressive voicing and devoicing assimilations (the last element determines the assimilation), but with some exceptions (mostly to distinguish minimal pairs by voicing).^[7]

Udmurt is an agglutinating language. It uses affixes to express possession, to specify mode, time, and so on.

No gender distinction is made in nouns or personal pronouns.

Udmurt has fifteen cases: eight grammatical cases and seven locative cases.

There is no congruency between adjectives and nouns in neutral Udmurt noun phrases; in other words, there is no adjective declension as in the inessive noun phrase бадӟым гуртын ("in a big village"; cf. Finnish inessive phrase isossa kylässä, in which iso "large" is inflected according to the head noun).

*Of all the locative cases, personal pronouns can only inflect in the allative (also called approximative).

There are two types of nominal plurals in Udmurt. One is the plural for nouns -ос/-ëс and the other is the plural for adjectives -эсь/-есь.

The noun is always in plural. In attributive plural phrases, the adjective is not required to be in the plural:

The plural marker always comes before other endings (i.e. cases and possessive suffixes) in the morphological structure of plural nominal.

As in Hungarian and Mordvinic languages, if the subject is plural, the adjective is always plural when it functions as the sentence's predicative:

Udmurt pronouns are inflected much in the same way that their referent nouns are. However, personal pronouns are only inflected in the grammatical cases and cannot be inflected in the locative cases.

Udmurt personal pronouns are used to refer to human beings only. However, the third person singular can be referred to as it. The nominative case of personal pronouns are listed in the following table:

More details:

• There are self-intensifier forms: ачим '[I] myself', ачид '[you] yourself', ачиз '[he/she/it] himself', асьмеос '[we] ourselves', асьтэос '[you] yourself', асьсэос '[they] yourself'.^[8]

• The 1st person plural has two forms according to clusivity: асьмеос is "inclusive we" and "ми" is "exclusive we". The younger speakers seem to favor always using "ми" (probably under the influence of Russian 'my' for "we"), so that for older generation the verse from a popular song "Ойдо, нылаш ми тонэн пумиськом!" sounds strange: its intended meaning is "Hey girl, let us meet!", while in the traditional thinking it reads "Hey girl, let we all meet with you!" The expected proper phrase would be: "Ойдо, нылаш асьмеос пумиськом!" and 'ми тонэн' is a calque from the Russian phrase 'my s toboi' meaning "me and you", but the word-by-word translation is "we with you".^[8]

Udmurt interrogative pronouns inflect in all cases. However, the inanimate interrogative pronouns 'what' in the locative cases have the base form кыт-. The nominative case of interrogative pronouns are listed in the following table:

Udmurt verbs are divided into two conjugation groups, both having the infinitive marker -ны.

There are three verbal moods in Udmurt: indicative, conditional and imperative. There is also an optative mood used in certain dialects. The indicative mood has four tenses: present, future, and two past tenses. In addition there are four past tense structures which include auxiliary verbs. Verbs are negated by use of an auxiliary negative verb that conjugates with personal endings.

The basic verbal personal markers in Udmurt are (with some exceptions):

*The present tense in Udmurt in all but the third person, is marked with -(ӥ)сько-/-(и)сько-.

Udmurt is an SOV language.

Depending on the style, about 10 to 30 percent of the Udmurt lexicon consists of loanwords. Many loanwords are from the Tatar language, which has also strongly influenced Udmurt phonology and syntax.

The Udmurt language, along with the Tatar language, influenced the language of the Udmurt Jews, in the dialects of which the words of Finno-Ugric and Turkic origin there were recorded.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Eurovision runners-up Buranovskiye Babushki, a pop group composed of Udmurt grandmothers, sing mostly in Udmurt.^[13]

The romantic comedy film Berry-Strawberry, a joint Polish-Udmurt production, is in the Udmurt language.

In 2013, the film company "Inwis kinopottonni" produced a film in the Udmurt language called Puzkar ("nest").^[14]

The Bible was first completely translated into Udmurt in 2013.^[15]

• Csúcs, Sándor (1998). "Udmurt". In Abondolo, Daniel (ed.). The Uralic Languages. London: Routledge. pp. 276–304.
• Kel'makov, Valentin; Sara Hännikäinen (2008). Udmurtin kielioppia ja harjoituksia (in Finnish) (2nd ed.). Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura. ISBN 978-952-5150-34-6.
• Moreau, Jean-Luc (2009). Parlons Oudmourte. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 978-2-296-07951-9.
• Svetlana Edygarova (18 October 2014). "The varieties of the modern Udmurt language". Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen (62): 376–398. doi:10.33339/FUF.86085. ISSN 0355-1253. Wikidata Q122984591.

•   Media related to Udmurt language at Wikimedia Commons

• Udmurtology: Udmurt Language, History and Culture(in Russian)
• Literature
• The First Udmurt Forum Archived 2017-04-21 at the Wayback Machine(in Russian)
• Udmurt State University (has Udmurt Language Program for English speakers)
• Udmurt language, alphabet and pronunciation
• Vladimir Napolskikh. Review of Eberhard Winkler, Udmurt, München 2001 (Languages of the World. Materials 212)
• Udmurt – Finnish/Komi Zyrian dictionary Archived 2016-06-07 at the Wayback Machine (robust finite-state, open-source)
• Learning Udmurt words
• BGN/PCGN romanization tool for Udmurt